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Railroad Tycoon II

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Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#61

Post by jwcooper »

pjmlp wrote: post #48
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a good chance that if that if Microsoft doesn't act soon enough, and a lot more devices running Steam OS are released, Proton might become the de-facto platform against which many new games are developed, and which engines target. At that point, there is nothing Microsoft can do.

Microsoft controls Windows and DirectX, Valve only gets to play until Windows landlord allows it. DR-DOS, OS/2 and EEE PC. Lets see if SteamOS makes the list as well, this is after all round two, Steam Machines didn't go that well.

The Steam Deck is basically the successor to the Steam Machines. The actual hardware didn't go that well, but they laid the foundation in software for what we have now.

So, in a way, the Steam Machines were a great success.

Also, Valve has (for better and worse) far more power and control in the gaming ecosystem than most companies Microsoft has to deal with.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#62

Post by jwcooper »

pjmlp wrote: post #29
mschuster91 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it. Microsoft can't do shit against WINE/Proton legally, as long as either project steers clear of misappropriated source code and some forms of reverse engineering (Europe's regulations are much more relaxed than in the US). The problem at…

They surely can, and Valve got lucky UWP didn't took off as they feared. Microsoft can easily do another go at it. That is the problem building castles on other vendor platforms. As reminder, https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/127475-valve-confirms-ste...

Microsoft is going the opposite of what you're suggesting. Their games are coming to Steam, Playstation and Switch. Also, their game division isn't exactly thriving right now. They have a ton of studios, but they are not selling hardware very well right now.

The more that time goes on, and the more entrenched steamOS/Proton becomes, they will not have any sort of easy time trying to lock-in to Windows. Even now in the earliest days of steamOS, there is blow-back when a game does not support the Steam Deck (which means Proton).

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#63

Post by bluGill »

mapt wrote: post #37
mrighele wrote: post #33

> Indeed, in some of the most difficult scenarios, the efficient operation of your railroad provides no more than the seed capital for the real key to victory, your shenanigans on the stock market. This is in fact what I don't like about RR2. The stock market had too much of a big part in my opinion, and I never enjoyed it. I liked much more Transport Tycoon (and its open source version OpenTTD) which had much more f…

It may not be enjoyable, but for about a century, railroad schemes were often as much about entrepreneurial fundraising, land rights, and corruption as about actually delivering infrastructure - it's thematically correct. Colm Meaney delivers an entertaining performance with regards to this in 'Hell on Wheels'. There are parts of Pennsylvania that briefly got violent with each other over gauge changes (and thus, whic…

Depends on the rail road. Most were as much about what government subsidies they could get (federal, state and cities all did various things as they saw any railroad as key to their success).

A couple railroads started because there was money to be had in transporting things. They picked routes that made a lot more sense (a compromise of geography and the cities served) even today when we don't have to refill the steam engine with water ever few miles. These are the exception though. Most were trying to get the upfront money and not thinking about the long term success.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#64

Post by mywittyname »

infecto wrote: post #3
legitster wrote: post #2

> In this reviewer’s opinion, it was a sparkling creative success as well as a commercial one, making it all the more deserving of remembrance. We’ve seen a fair number of train games built on similar premises in the years since 1998, but I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a comprehensively better one. RRT2 is my all time favorite game, and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart. Alongside Anno 1602, it may…

I need to load this one up again and see how it plays. One of my complaints in most of the train and tycoon style games these days is they are too darn easy from a strategy perspective or they require casts amount of micro managing.

The stock management portion of the game adds a lot of depth. Strategy-wise, RTII is pretty simple still - a simple line between two reasonably sized cities will be profitable, so long as you keep the number of lines between the two low enough. But they can be more profitable if you're smart about which cities are connected.

But trying to acquire the entire company is actually pretty difficult. You can buy stock on margin, but the rates are oppressively high, so it only makes sense to do so in short burst between expansion phases. But there's still risk, the economy can go south or the expansion may not be as profitable as expected, and if that happens, there's the risk of loans being called and your stock being liquidated.

I'd say most of my enjoyment of the game stems from the effort to amass a personal fortune. Eventually, you do learn how to execute various securities frauds, which is pretty entertaining itself.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#65

Post by legitster »

jcranmer wrote: post #60
legitster wrote: post #2

> In this reviewer’s opinion, it was a sparkling creative success as well as a commercial one, making it all the more deserving of remembrance. We’ve seen a fair number of train games built on similar premises in the years since 1998, but I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a comprehensively better one. RRT2 is my all time favorite game, and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart. Alongside Anno 1602, it may…

Speaking of older games that never had a successor that quite managed to capture what they did well, there's also SimTower, where the main successors are Yoot Tower (which never really made it out of Japan) and Project Highrise, which just doesn't scratch the same itch.

There were not a lot of published games, but I seem to remember there being a handful of flash game derivatives. I played the heck out of Corporation Inc on Armorgames back in the day.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#66

Post by legitster »

kimiahk wrote: post #55
legitster wrote: post #2

> In this reviewer’s opinion, it was a sparkling creative success as well as a commercial one, making it all the more deserving of remembrance. We’ve seen a fair number of train games built on similar premises in the years since 1998, but I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a comprehensively better one. RRT2 is my all time favorite game, and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart. Alongside Anno 1602, it may…

Anno 1602 was my favorite game when I was young, I wonder what game type do you usually play? Official single player missons? Community custom missions or multiplayer?

I usually just open up a random map and fart around. It's just a fun, chill city builder for me.

The subsequent Anno games are amazing as well, but Anno 1602 scratches the same itch and can run on an ancient laptop when travelling. Also, it's not locked behind Ubisoft's cancerous PC launcher.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#67

Post by jandrese »

pjmlp wrote: post #47
jandrese wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand building Linux binaries and keeping them running for years without maintenance has proven far more difficult than emulating Windows. For an example track down the ports Loki games did many years ago and try to get them running on a modern machine. The most reliable way for me has been to install a very old version of Linux (Redhat 8, note: Not RHEL 8) on a VM and run them in there.

Naturally it means GNU/Linux will never improve until being forced upon.

It just means Microsoft has put more emphasis on ABI compatibility. This makes sense. In the open source world ABI compatibility is less of an issue because you can just recompile if there are breaking changes. ABI compatibility is far more important in a commercial closed source context where the source may be lost forever when a company shuts down or discontinues a product line.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#68

Post by pxc »

Dalewyn wrote: post #32
baq wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WINE and Proton piggyback on Microsoft's guarantees of Win32 stability. As long as that remains in place (which should be for all intents and purposes forever given MS's customers) they can't really do anything about it. So, next time you hear the joke about Win32 ABI being the only stable ABI on Linux, remember it's funny because it's true!

Don't forget Windows finally made Year of the Linux Desktop(tm) a reality, Windows is the best desktop Linux distro (Android gets the mobile Linux distro crown).

Windows' desktop environment is much too lackluster for that. It's uniquely inconsistent (many distinct toolkits with irreconcilable look-and-feel, even in the base system), has poorly organized system configuration apps that are not very capable, takes a long time to start up so that the desktop becomes usable, is full of nasty dark patterns, suffers an infestation of ads in many versions.

Besides the many issues with the desktop itself, Windows offers piss poor filesystem performance for common developer tools, plus leaves users to contend with the complexity of a split world thanks to the (very slow) 9pfs shares used to present host filesystems to guest and vice-versa.

And then there's the many nasty and long-lived bugs, from showstopping memory leaks to data loss on the virtual disks of the guests to broken cursor tracking for GUI apps in WSLg...

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#69

Post by giobox »

linsomniac wrote: post #36
runlevel1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that the period of time when you got more bang for your buck building a PC with dual-socket Celerons than one high-end Pentium? EDIT: An excellent retrospective on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE-k4hYHIDE

Yes, the dual Celeron 300As, if you could take advantage of multiple cores, were faster than the higher end CPUs, particularly if you overclocked to 450MHz. My box was stable at 450MHz for around a year, then I had to gradually down-clock it, eventually back to 300. Never really did much to track down why that was, just rolled with it and figured I should be grateful for the overclocking I had.

I also ran a dual Celeron system overclocked to 450mhz - it was great value in 1999. Abit even launched a motherboard that let you run dual Celerons without modifying the processors, the legendary BP6:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6

This was first board to let you use unmodified Celerons, the "hack" to let dual CPUs work with those chips was performed at the motherboard level, no CPU pin modifications needed.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#70

Post by mywittyname »

ryandrake wrote: post #41
mrighele wrote: post #33

> Indeed, in some of the most difficult scenarios, the efficient operation of your railroad provides no more than the seed capital for the real key to victory, your shenanigans on the stock market. This is in fact what I don't like about RR2. The stock market had too much of a big part in my opinion, and I never enjoyed it. I liked much more Transport Tycoon (and its open source version OpenTTD) which had much more f…

This is the same problem with the more recent Offworld Trading Company game. You can take a half an hour building a great colony, harvesting all the resources, building all of the goods, and so on, but none of it really matters. The end game takes about 60-120 seconds and it's all trading on the in-game stock market, resulting in a sudden "you lost" screen popping up even if you did everything else right in the first…

> even if you did everything else right in the first 29 minutes.

But you didn't do everything right. What makes OWTC different from most economics sims is that the goal is to quickly establish monopolies on the various planets. So unless you starved the competition of resources, pivoted to producing high-value products from cheap commodities, or speed run to offworld shipments, with an eye towards buying out everyone else, you're not playing to win.

The matches are sprints, not marathons. And faction abilities are critical to victory. You really have to chose matches that favor your faction if you want the upper hand.

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